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A Wildcat Family

When planetary sciences professor Tom Gehrels joined the UA faculty in 1961, his young son George had no aspirations of following his father into the science field.

But 25 years later, George accepted a position as a University of Arizona geosciences professor, making George and Tom Gehrels the first father and son professors to teach at the UA.

"We have always promoted the UA for undergraduate work," the elder Gehrels said. "(And) so we had it in our family also. It happened in a sort of natural way."

George Gehrels and his older brother Neil, as well as his younger sister, all earned degrees from the UA. Two international students the family has hosted over the years also followed the Wildcat tradition, obtaining various degrees ranging in disciplines from English to biology.

In addition, Aleida Gehrels, the family matriarch, is currently working on a bachelor's degree in biology, several years after earning her doctorate in French literature. However, George is the only member of the close-knit family to return to the university to teach.

While the Gehrels are often organizing family gatherings at each other's homes, they said their different areas of study usually keep work and family separate.

"Our research areas are quite different," George Gehrels said. "There has not been much professional overlap."

The Gehrels family was introduced to the UA in the early 1960s, when Tom Gehrels responded to a call made by former UA President Richard Harvill for astronomers to join the faculty after the Kitt Peak Observatory moved to Tucson.

"I remember vividly as a kid going up with my dad to the telescope at Mt. Lemmon," the younger Gehrels said. "It was like a playground up there - fascinating."

However, George and his brother Neil were still intent on following their decidedly non-scientific interests.

"When I was growing up, my older brother and I knew we were not going to become scientists," George Gehrels said. "My brother wanted to be a rock star and a composer, and I wanted to open a wood shop."

Still, the boys' pleasant childhood memories of following their father to work eventually made science and research a natural career path.

"I always had a pretty good time and so if they saw anything at all, something must have been that we had pretty good times in science," Tom Gehrels said.

The good times came back to George Gehrels while he was a self-described "ski bum" attending UA in the 1970s.

"I almost left the university in the fall of my junior year and then I took a geology class - I don't know why, it just looked interesting - and then I changed my major and became a geology major," he said.

After studying tectonics at the University of Southern California and CalTech, George caught the attention of his alma mater in 1986, which offered him a position on the geosciences faculty, where he teaches undergraduate courses on oceanography and structural geology.

"It was one of the most attractive jobs to become available," George Gehrels said.

Though the Gehrels' 13 years working together has been generally without incident, occasionally colleagues confuse the many members of the academic family.

Fellow researchers in the astronomy and planetary sciences departments commonly address George Gehrels by his brother Neil's name. George Gehrels also recalled a time when a woman in the administration office praised his "wife's" teaching work with her daughter - his spouse, Jennifer, is a preschool teacher in town.

However, the woman was referring to her adult daughter's experience in George's mother's French class.

"There's just no place for George," Tom Gehrels joked.

But there are still places for the next generation of the Gehrels family.

Years after he, his siblings and mother graduated from the UA, George Gehrels said his own children, now in their teens, will soon start applying to colleges - and the University of Arizona will be the first choice.

However, if they also obtain doctorates remains to be seen.

"It will be interesting to see what the next generation is going to do," Tom Gehrels said.